Interviewing Kit Power
Helloooo!
Last week I reviewed some superb non-fiction in the form of My Life In Horror Volume 1 by Kit Power while it is indeed looking at horror icons and modern classics; the brief is also our understanding of horror which as a child and teenager can appear in books, school, the news and even music. The essays collated for the first time are intelligent, reflective, personal and I suspect will ring true for many of us. I was delighted to have a chance to ask Kit some questions and also get news of how we can get our Volume 2
Heeeey! Thanks so much for inviting me to be part of your blog, really appreciate it.
So what is My Life In Horror and what will Volume 2 offer?
My Life In Horror is a blog project that’s been running for the last eight years over at Gingernuts Of Horror. It came about following a couple of essays I’d written for the site. The proprietor, Jim Mcleod, invited me to come on board with a regular feature, and after kicking a few ideas about, this is what we settled on; a blog series where I would write about the novels, films, albums and events that I considered to be horror and which had some kind of impact on my young mind. Increasingly as the series progressed I cast my net wider and wider, partly for the challenge and partly to try and interrogate what Horror really meant to me and why it held such a perennial fascination for me.
Fast-forward to late 2019. I’ve been thinking about collecting the first 30 essays into a single volume, ideally in time to launch it at Stokercon 2020. The only problem is that I’ve left it hilariously late to pitch the idea to publishers, and while I’m sure the convention would make a great venue to bring the book to people, it’s a bit of a stretch to find someone who’ll take it on and get it in shape for April 2020.
And then some genius says… ‘unless you crowdfund it?’
I knew I wanted to offer something special for backers; collector's items that would be both beautiful objects and have value due to their rarity. So the campaign featured two limited hardbacks, both with their own campaign-exclusive cover art and signature sheets. With the Deluxe Edition, which was limited to just 26 copies, I also included an essay that will never be reprinted anywhere else.
In the event, Stokercon 2020 got sunk by covid. But the My Life In Horror Volume 1 crowdfunder was successful, and now the book is available in mass market hardback, paperback and ebook. And honestly, I’m really proud of it; thanks to the crowdfunder I managed to get the entire text professionally edited and formatted, and by resequencing the articles in the order that I first encountered them, the book ended up reading like an autobiography via the medium of pop culture artefacts - something I’d suspected might work, but you never actually know until you’ve got the text laid out. And it’s been very well received.
Once I realised I would be bringing My Life In Horror to a conclusion this October, I knew I’d want to run a second crowdfunder for the final volume, to ensure it’s produced to the same high standards as the first one. Volume II will follow the same format - 35 essays, this time, from 2017 to date, all fully revised and professionally edited. This time out, I’m ensuring that all the physical rewards for the crowdfunder are limited editions, with exclusive cover art, including the paperbacks, so the people who do back the campaign and, hopefully, make the mass market version viable will get a genuine collector’s item in exchange for their support. The subject of the Volume II essays range far and wide; from covering movies like One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest, Casino, and Romero’s Martin, to albums like Pink Floyd’s The Wall, real-life events such as the Columbine massacre, and much, much more. For volume II things go deeper and more personal. I’m working on the final text now, to ensure everything’s in place if the campaign is successful, and I’m really happy with how the book’s turned out.
How has it been looking back on those early genre experiences and seeing who you were and are now?
What’s funny about it is I have people contact me to say they're impressed by the level of recall I have, but the truth is I don’t… at least, not when I start. With any given essay, it’s been more about trying to work out why a specific thing holds such an important place in my emotional memory or imagination, and the essay writing has really been an act of excavation, digging in to try and make sense of things. So the recall comes, but it comes via the act of writing, the drafting of the essay becomes a kind of quest of rediscovery, I suppose. Which is profoundly strange and also rather wonderful, for the most part. As a result of doing this project, I have a far clearer picture of at least some aspects of my life than I’d had before, which is really an incredible gift. So, yeah, it’s been an eye-opener, especially when you see patterns of behaviour and attraction across different, apparently disparate media, and then think about the time and place of the first encounter, and go ‘ah, right, yes, that’s where that comes from!’
When we say a writer has influences we normally just meant another writer but these days is it a wider field of media having that impact? Has My Life In Horror suggested a few more for your own work than you originally consciously knew about?
Yeah, absolutely this. One of the key essays for the whole project was the Volume I essay about Queen’s Greatest Hits II - not obviously a source of horror, and not something that’d been on my initial list of subjects for the series. But the opening of the essay is absolutely a true story, buying the CD, sticking it on for the car journey, and then falling down a rabbit hole of memory, and I remember thinking ‘there’s something to this, music is time travel’, which is an idea that’s informed both fiction and non-fiction work for me since. But I don’t think I’d have been able to trace just how many threads from that album, that band, run through my own life if I hadn’t written that essay. Similar things happened in Volume II, most recently when I revisited the 50’s Brando biker movie The Wild One, and there ended up being enough layers of meaning and connection that I realised there could have been a book in it. And then there’s the magic of looking back at something like Scream, which I knew I loved, but then really digging into why? Why was that movie at that moment so important to me? And it turns out there’s all this stuff about subverting expectation, being pulp while commenting on pulp, that is enormously appealing and important to me but I wouldn’t necessarily have been able to articulate it without the essay to explore it all.
Does our relationship with horror continue to change as we get older?
I mean, no experience is universal, but I think for most people, sure, because our relationship to all art changes and evolves as we change and evolve, grow… It’s interesting hearing older hands in the field talking about how some aspects of horror writing they find tougher as they get older, for example. And of course part of the fun of this project has been revisiting some of those childhood and teenage ‘classics’ and finding out that some of them hold up… and some of them don’t. Though, too, sometimes the reason a given work becomes so important is because it serves as a bridge back to the time you first encountered it; so even though you’re a different person with more life experience, that book, or movie, or album reconnects you with an earlier time and place, that earlier You, which can be enormously comforting. Because, you know, as you get older, it does become harder to be shocked, to be awed by art of any kind; you may have in some ways a deeper appreciation, but the trade-off is that you’ll encounter something and often feel like ‘Oh, yeah neat, it’s a bit like this thing but with an element from that other thing and they've used this technique to thread the narrative, that’s new, I like it’; and that’s a fundamentally different experience to being 14 years old and hearing Nirvana and feeling a little like you just got hit by a meteor because you have no frame of reference for what just happened. And what’s interesting is that, as an adult, you can trace the roots of punk and metal in the music, and understand how the politics were a reaction to cock rock, and so on, but when you put the album on, part of you is still 14 again - or, at least, part of me is - and there’s this fascinating duel consciousness where some of the brain is running the intellectual analysis but also a big part is just going ‘fuck, yeah!’, being hit by the meteor again. And music is especially powerful for that, sure, but some movies, some books, can do the same thing. So, yes, our relationship with the genre changes with us… but also, there will always (I hope) be those seminal, seismic works that take us back to a place of wonder, no matter how well we understand the moving parts with our adult minds.
Are you at all worried that countless Avatar sequels could steal the crown from Robocop as the greatest movie ever made?
I can honestly say that this is probably the thing about which I worry the least.
Where can we find out more about the crowd-funder and what else can we look forward to from you in the future? Where best to find you?
The crowdfunder is running throughout October - see https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/my-life-in-horror-volume-two/x/22919255#/ - and there’s pledge options to suit every budget, from just a couple of quid to snag the ebook edition at a campaign exclusive discount rate, to the Deluxe Hardback, lettered, signed hardback with campaign exclusive cover art and a never-to-be-reprinted essay.
Assuming I survive the campaign, I have a lot of irons in the fire; slightly too many podcast projects, another essay series with Gingernuts covering the work of Brian Keene, a co-authored novel that’s trying to find the right agent, and lots of other fiction ideas of various shapes and sizes.
Best place to find me on the socials is Twitter - @KitGonzo - though I should warn you I do get political and ranty, from time to time. And my Author page on Amazon is the best place to find my books: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Kit-Power/e/B00K6J438K?ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1&qid=1664759362&sr=1-1
People and also keep up to date with my publications and podcasts via my monthly Newsletter, where, in between pictures of my frankly adorable pets, I give the lowdown on what’s been published that month and what’s planned for the next.
Finally, if you want early access to something new from me every week, in a mix of fiction, non-ficiton and audio output, including an exclusive podcast on Sherlock Holmes, just $1 a month over at Patreon will get that done.
If there was one book, not your own, that you wish you could get everyone to read what would it be and why?
Oh, what a brutal question to end on, ouch! There’s far, far too many to choose from, but I guess I’ll go with Stephen King’s On Writing; not that he nedds the money, but it’s still, I think, the best non-ficiton book about writing, and the most inspirational, that I have ever read. It’s actually at it’s core a quiet but very powerful piece of evangelism for the redemptive power of making art for it’s own sake, and whenever I’m finding my own writing path hitting bumps in the road or I’m struggling with what to do next or what to do to build success or whatever, I’m drawn back to this book and the core principle that I do this stuff because I love it, and because it’s nourishing and sustaining. And My Life In Horror has certainly been that, and wouldn’t exist without that book. So, yeah, let’s go with that :)
